It’s a tough life being an indie game developer, especially in Russia. However, we’re finally ready to receive your submissions for the very first closed alpha of Feral Blue. If our game sounds up your alley — welcome! Here’s the page for signing up.

So about that tough life. We’ve almost written a detailed post about our work and struggles, but then Roskomnadzor decided to block our site out of the blue, which we then had to deal with and… It’s a long and boring story, which can be explained better with this quote of the soviet philosopher Alexander Pyatigorsky:

‘(Quietly, thoughtfully) The most prominent trait of Russia is not theft, not corruption, not stupidity or anger… (switching to barely audible muttering) not rudeness, not vanity or ignorance. The most prominent trait of Russia is BULLSHIT! SOME RANDOM BULLSHIT!!!’

Anyway, we are looking forward to your participation in alpha and also hope you’ll agree to subscribe to our newsletter — we wanted to try and keep in touch with our subscribers via a special channel. Here’s the link again.

So why do we even want to launch this closed alpha? It’s mainly about these three things.

First of all, we want to have a selected portion of players check the earliest version of the game initially. Before the game goes live in Early Access, when all kinds of people come in — we want to share the build with the most active, most hardcore and most experienced players we have among followers here.

The feedback from such players is truly invaluable. And we don’t say this for politeness’ sake or marketing blah-blah — it’s a fact: sometimes players understand what needs to be done with the game better than the developers. Just look at DOTA, Portal games, Team Fortress 2, CS, PUBG — all of these games were born with the help of fan communities first.

Secondly, we need to make sure that all of the base game mechanics work properly with each other. If they do, then we’ll only need to fill the project with content and better visuals. It’s a painfully long and expensive process, but at least it’s clear how to do it.

Thirdly, marketing. As you probably already know, the markets for any games are oversaturated — mobile, PC and even console (besides, everyone has a list of TV shows to watch, books and comics to read, and so on). By the way, if it’s not too much trouble — please share Feral Blue’s Steam page with your friend, who may like the sound of it. If we manage to collect 50 thousand wishlist adds before the release, then we promise everyone a free DLC with a new faction (Tlingit knights from Alaska in wooden armor? Chukotka raiders in seal armor? We have time to think this over).

Here’s what we want to with this first closed alpha — we’ll try to fill in as many game mechanics as we can. Right now we have everything that’s connected with the sea part of the game: the map, battles, boarding, riots, captain duels and ship upgrades. We even have some quests in.

At the moment we’re only missing the settlement mechanic — here we plan to use the logic of towns seen in Mount & Blade, but with some additions. This will take up more time than we thought, so delays are inevitable. If we manage to add this into the game in a month, than you can expect the alpha in the middle of March. If we see we can’t make it in time, then we’ll see you in a month.

And yes, we’ll do our best to start the alpha sign-up soon, so stay tuned!

Right now we’re in the final stages of preparing the first and very early alpha build — we’d like to put it out before the holidays, but chances are slim. It’s how it usually goes: first you make the most essential gameplay elements, to get the project take some shape. But when you’re done with the basics, you immediately spot hundreds of small mistakes, typos and other stupid things. This button here looks bad, this animation stutters, this icon can’t be clicked on, and this menu takes up too much space on the screen. Such things have little effect on the gameplay itself, but they are still annoying. So we’ll have to try and fix that.

On the other hand, we remade the post-processing from the ground up, changed lighting effects and almost managed to get rain, snow and fog right. AI enemies now try to use different tactics against you — moreover, we’ve added several ‘character’ preset for enemy captains: they will act crazy and reckless, desperately looking for boarding fights, even with little chance to win. On the contrary, those with superior numbers and strength will try to be cautious and avoid unnecessary battles. Some captains will act both ways just to throw you off.

Here is the gif with some of the December’s work on strategic map, naval battles and boarding fights.

Today we’d like to tell you about the image placed below this paragraph. This is a screenshot of the current version of Feral Blue, and it shows a two-week work of our team.

Let’s be honest — you’ll have to make a serious effort to even quietly mumble ‘wow, cool…’. Nothing here speaks of two-week worth of work. We’ve posted a lot of similar screenshots already, so where’s the difference? But there is one. There are a lot of problems in game development, and this is one of them: sometimes you have to put in hours in things hardly noticeable to players. For example, a poorly made aerial perspective, which on some configurations may look just fine, while on others — something can be off. Unnatural shadows, weird unpleasant glare, that are only visible at a certain camera angle. Dozens of such small annoyances that may or may not spoil the impression of the game.

We spend a lot of time fixing these little problems, because nothing annoys more than minor inconveniences, like an extra frame in the sword attack animation. Then a game’s released and it turns out that the main problem is constant crashes on PCs with S3 Savage4 GPUs, because of some driver issues that you can’t do anything about. Well, that’s life.

By the way, what are the strangest GPUs you ever used in your computers? We have a special box in our studio, where Matrox Millenium and Voodoo5 5500 cards are stored. What a time that was: you needed a special separate ‘accelerator’ for 3D graphics, without which you couldn’t play something like Nocturne.

Today we have a reason to remember our game from 2013 — Eador. Master of the Broken World. One incredibly hardworking person — by the name Jagulars — created his own mod for the game, which considerably changes the balance for heroes and some of the units. Our gamedesigner has been trying out the mod for five days straight and periodically shouting: ‘Hell no, this is too imba!’. Basically, the changes are quite substantial.

We believe that mods can be better than original games in some ways, because mod creators have the opportunity to create freely and with no release schedule. We may not agree fully with some of the balance choices made by Jagulars, but still we recommend everyone to play this mod.

Today we want to talk about the progress on the alpha version of the game. And we want to specify what word ‘alpha’ means for us — alpha is an early state of the project, where we test basic gameplay mechanics. If beta grows into ‘early access’ version, then into full release, then alpha is more like a game from alternative universe. For example, we’re not yet finished with the full faction list. The main archetypes are clear though: there will be Very Religious people who seek salvation in faith, there will be Technofanatics who use science instead of faith, and there will be nostalgic folks who’ll pretend the world hadn’t changed and try to keep living as before.

In addition to these behavior archetypes, there’s also a separate list of cultures. The most obvious candidates — Europeans of the Old Formation, who are faithful to the traditions and two-handed sword of their grandfathers. Europeans have a rowdy American cousin who gravitates towards liberty, piracy and wild entrepreneurship. Chinese civilization knows its era of great geographical discoveries, so without any doubt, the Empire’s fleet will become a prominent player in the water world. Islam is rarely present in games (a pity!), so Turkish, Algerian and Egyptian ships may well form quite an interesting faction. Who else could be there? Japanese wokou pirates? Maori rowing fleet? Stern Russian old believers from the North? And their equally stern neighbors from Norwegian fjords and islands of Scotland?

Of course, here we run into the need for a huge amount of art and models. Everything seems so appealing, that you can’t help but want to do all of these factions. For the alpha we’ll choose limited goals, within our budget — most likely, there will four factions. Each one get its own archetype, and, if possible, a unique appearance. We’ll see what can be done after that.

For now our goal is to launch the closed alpha by the end of the year. And we want to start collecting your e-mails in the near future as well, so that Santa could know who to gift a build of the game about sunken world.

More and more people are asking us how the land battles and the melee system as a whole will look like in Feral Blue. It’s an important question indeed, because poor fencing can turn any boarding fight into a formal routine or just pure hell. Here’s what we think.

It would be easier to describe what kind of melee system we do not want. Back when we were high school students and played the pirated version of Mortal Kombat on Sega, the most ingenious tactic was considered to be cornering your opponent and then torturing him with sweeps (in our team, only our designer Alexander used to do this, and we despise him for that). This is an example of a pretty poor melee system, and we don’t want to let players blindly buttonmash their way to victory. Same thing with ‘kiting’ — when your character can indefinitely fall back and attack the enemy at the same time.

On the other hand, we’ve had experience working with the Mount & Blade engine. It does have a good fencing system, but it might be a bit too intricate for our project. After all, the fencing system is at the very base of M&B, while we’re focusing more on naval combat and ship management. We shouldn’t lose focus of our efforts trying to do everything at once and better than anyone. Doing a rhythm-based game with blinking warning icons above the enemies is not something we want to do either — quite possibly a simply system with a couple strike types and blocks will be enough.

We can’t wait to put the alpha version out in the wild — to understand how viable our ideas are. And what about you — what’s your opinion on fencing in games? Can you name some good examples — where was this implemented extremely well?

News this week — we’ve finished designing main weaponry (check out the gif with crossbows shooting below), and now we’re switching to the initial balancing for ships that will see their way into the alpha.

In addition, we are almost finished with starting biomes: temperate climate, arctic climate, deserts. And since we’re talking about landscapes, we could also try making a scientific and educational statement. Global warming and polar ice melting won’t cause a worldwide flood by itself. But when things come to the permafrozen areas (which is the bigger part of countries like Canada and Russia), there can be different predictions.

For example, this can cause wild mudflows that will slowly wash off the continents into the sea, turning the world into giant system of lagoons and swamps. In general, of course, we’re making the water levels a bit too extreme for the interest’s sake, but remember — climate change is no joke.

Today we’ll talk about out plans for the alpha version. As we said earlier, we’d like to start sending out keys before winter — to grant access for the very, veryearly version of the game. Right now we’re discussing how we should go about sending those keys exactly, to avoid any problems.

So what will there be in the alpha? It’s tough to say for sure, but here’s what we’re aiming for.

1) Working strategic map

You can see the world, there are some settlements, with ships sailing in between. Settlements (for now) can be used for trading and getting quests. Ships, though, give you a bit more options: you can sink them, board and sink them, capture enemy vessels and sink your old one and so on. On the same screen you can assign your crewmates to different ship areas — who should be resting in the infirmary, and who should be throwing coal into the furnace.

2) Working naval combat

Here’s what kind of system we’re working on — you can shoot manually from the board, adjusting the angle how you want. You can also shoot with the whole board at once (if your ship has many cannons) or shoot with one aimed cannon first and then — with the whole board. In addition, you’re able to shoot without aiming, when you think the situation allows it.

At the moment, all basic things are almost in place, but we need to set the battle distance and touch up the ship models.

3) Mechanics for morale, riots and challenging contenders

If you feed your crew badly, sell prisoners to cannibals too often or otherwise worsen the fighting spirit of your mates — you can expect a riot. In that case, a loyal part of the team may come to help you beat the rebels, or the conspirators will nominate their candidate for the captain title, that you’ll need to fight in a duel.

By the way, if your character dies in that duel or in some other way — you’ll continue playing as his successor.

4) Towns as a game mechanic

This means that there will not be any visual marvels present for now — just a place, where you sell captives and captured, upgrade your ship and buy food. However, you’ll probably be able to walk in the draft version of the town.

5) A couple of quest lines

We want the players to focus on their own stories, that they could write with their actions. However, we do plan for a few quests to be in the game, with a couple of them to be in the alpha. If possible — with heavy moral choices.

What’s important for us is at the moment you are able to play Feral Blue and see the basic mechanics. So this plan above should be (hopefully) achievable. Besides, we’ve finished modelling the new and wonderful organ gun, and we wish you’d know how cool it shoots.

Today we want to talk about the battle distance on our game. In games with naval themes this is a very important thing, which makes a direct influence on whether the whole process is fun for you or not. In Blood & Gold we had it wrong, but we had no other choice for many technical reasons. So this time, with Feral Blue, we want to get it right.

So why is the battle distance so important? Because it can make the game challenging. If it’s too close — then it becomes too easy. It’s like going to the shooting gallery and shoot at a point blank range. It may work for stress relief, but is it fun? And if it does becomes interesting for you, we recommend contacting the psychiatric support as soon as possible (just in case).

With Blood & Gold, we forced Mount & Blade engine do things it was not really designed for. And if we had the possibility to make the distance longer, then we’d have a more meaningful aiming, we could introduce the concept of ‘aiming shot’ — when the gunner looks where the shell went, in order to make further adjustments.

However, the distance also relies on the speed of the ships. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, we’re looking at you. Seriously though, Black Flag has pretty fun naval combat — but only for the first few hours. The jet ships change everything: no tactics to speak of, we’re just shooting and dodging, like in a platformer game Cuphead, only without the ability to jump.

So our goal here is to make you think while in naval combat, but without overdoing it and making it tedious. After all, spending three minutes of real time just to get close to an enemy ship is not the most fun thing to do.

That’s why on the gif above you can see how ‘point blank’ shot looks like in the game — when speaking of the visual side, this way the battle looks more dynamic. And yes, you’re right — the catapult has no textures for now, it’s just a temporary ‘representation’ of the catapult.